This was a "short" time ago, only if you live in western Europe or the urban United States. People living anywhere else on Earth, today, are placed under constant duress to either actively support the local prevailing religion, or, at best, maintain an obedient silence.
Note that moral obligation is independent of, as you say, "effectiveness." If something is immoral, you must abstain, and if something is moral, you must obey, regardless of the cost or practicality. That's why it's a moral point and not an ethical one; there are no norms involved, no question of best efforts, if it happens you've failed, end of story. If abortion is murder, then compulsory, state-enforced pregnancy must be tolerated, regardless of the "effectiveness" in regulating this. Similarly, if it is immoral for a man to die for want of money, this must be prevented, by whatever means and with whatever compulsory forces are available -- at least as much force as we apply to keep the fetal hearts beating.
On this, I wonder how many people would vote for national health insurance if we passed a law forcing everyone to work for a psychiatric services charity once a year, or to look at pictures of untreated gum disorders? These are no coercive than forced trans-vaginal ultrasounds or ritualistic, politician-dictated recitations in the doctor's office.
When someone starves, American religious conservatives don't see themselves failing their moral obligations, and they hem and haw on "the role of government" and they concern-troll on costs. But when a baby is aborted, they do see themselves as failing their moral obligations, and nothing can stand in their way to prevent it, personal liberty, the doctor-patient relationship, the integrity of the body and science be damned. Why is this?
While I doubt any pro-lifer would want a baby to die of malnutrition, we tend not to see them marching with signs in the street to that effect, and they're happy to vote for politicians that cut healthcare and education spending in favor of nominal pro-life policies (while suspiciously never actually achieving them).
Pro-lifers seem believe that the state's tolerance of abortion falls morally upon everyone in the state, and if they take no act to stop it, then they are as guilty as the doctors -- this plays into the various evangelical narrative tropes of the "sick society" or "corrupt world" that tempts judgement and requires "rescuing."
However, you don't meet many pro-lifers who believe their moral obligation to heal the sick of feed the hungry extends to getting laws passed or protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court. For some reason, whenever it comes to a social issue that codes as "left wing" from a 1950s perspective, the Pray Brigade seems to forget where they put their marching shoes.
Be fair. I never practiced any pop-psychology on Kurzweil and neither does the documentary. K speaks openly about his desire to live forever and use the information in the Singularity to bring his father back to life. You don't need to be a psychologist to put 2 and 2 together, and it's not "pop psychology" to talk about someone's motivations.
The Student worked at his computer day and night. He was so frustrated because there was so much to know. The Master asked "Why do you sit all day, in a dark room with only words?" The student said "I'm trying to transcend biological limitations!"
I would say anyone who attempts to redefine "life" in terms suited to his personal needs is a sort of stalinist, yes. Kurzweil's ideas are unmistakably millennial and rife with historical imperative, just as Marx's ideas were. People like Marx and Ayn Rand are famous for "taking an idea as far as it can go." They're the ones who serve as examples of just how cheap and useless a mere "idea" is.
I'm not sure if the fact that Lanier's essay is 12 years old is supposed to mean anything. That it's 12 years old and still relevant is a remarkable thing in this day and age.
For interesting critiques on Kurzweil, you might...
... read Jaron Lanier, particularly his One Half of a Manifesto, where he makes a pretty compelling case that Kurzweil is a "cybernetic totalist" who's pretty much willing to throw away everything that makes human life worth living in order to prove that human nature is mechanistic and reducible to mere information.
... watch The Transcendent Man, a documentary on RK, which makes the pretty compelling case the Kurzweil is in fact obsessed with "the technological singularity" not because he has a rational basis for it to be, but because he's wracked with guilt for never having a good relationship with his father, and he's obsessed with the idea that the Singularity could not just prolong him forever, but resurrect his dead father as well. He's driven by the idea that death is abandonment or alienation and he's terrified of being abandoned, again.
Hitlers mission was to kill as many European Jews as possible in the hopes of killing the right guy.
This scenario is a little dubious, considering how difficult it was for The Terminator to kill a paltry three Sarah Connors, let alone attempt to perpetrate a genocide.
If Costco was a government entity this argument would make sense.
As it is Costco is a retailer; retailers are at liberty in an open economy to impose whatever conditions on a sale they please, buyers accept these conditions, and free exchange happens.
Costco's interest is in keeping as many customers as possible coming to their store, by maintaining an inventory at all times. If their entire inventory is bought up by CloudBackupInc on the first day, Costco is definitely hurt by that, because their business model only works by having as many customers as possible as happy as possible.
We have a constitution, and the right to privacy is there.
In the US, you are protected from government searches, but there is no right to "privacy" from any and all, except for those things carved out of substantive due process, which are neither "in" the Constitution or positive Constitutional law.
If a state is dependent upon multinational employers who can blackmail the government, it sounds like it is time to start encouraging local business development instead that may have at least some sort of loyalty to that particular state and its culture.
Of course, this is a vicious cycle, because the local employers are all stuck with the taxes that the multinational employers talk their way out of. "Loyalty" or "culture" of course are irrelevant, because they mean nothing to shareholders (nor am I sure they should).
Different state solutions at least provide incentive for a state to give up and try something different when a failed policy isn't working.
But if the law allows people to dump all of their costs in state A, and keep all their profits in state B, it's impossible to tell what policies "work."
If they left the state that'd be fine with everyone, the problem is corporations staying in the state, using the public services, the roads, the police and fire department, the courts, and sending their employees to the Medi-Cal office, all the while claiming that they don't have to pay for any of it because they happen to rent a mailbox in Reno, Nevada.
NASA is supposed to be SpaceX's primary customer. NASA builds a lot of satellites and space probes, manages and is the primary funder of a lot of space missions, and ships a lot of payload to the ISS.
Rockets are the means to space exploration, not the end. NASA is still a big player in the ends business, even if it doesn't develop a lot of new means lately.
You see one of these stories every few months. Behold, these people are homeless and seek out non-emergent care for their children. Wouldn't you rather these people be paying for this through insurance premiums, rather than having to rely on charity? No other country in the developed world has this.
Do you really think that parents that take their kids to the ER for a fever and/or ear infection are going to suddenly stop taking their kids to the ER and go to their regular doctor?
Well yeah, they'll have insurance. These people aren't hopeless morons, and they love their children and what whats best for them. Indigent homeless are trickier, but you see a lot of working homeless families lining up around the block to get their non-emergent medical needs addressed. Under a
In some states that can be Robamacare and in others it can be insurance and tort reform. Tort reform would save the system more money then any of the current proposals.
You forgot to call the President "hopey changey," or make a reference to the "democrat party." Minus two points.
Tort reform is a bit of a red herring. Orrin Hatch's Tort Reform proposals in '09 would have saved about $54 billion, which isn't chump change, but it would only reduce total national health spending by 0.5%. So we could claim that money on the table, but the limitations in Hatch's proposal specifically were extremely low, to the extent that they reduced pain and suffering awards to a slap on the wrist and would probably cause incidents of malpractice to increase.
State-by-state solutions are doomed in the US because of regulatory arbitrage. Employers and tax units in states with expensive programs can simply move their paper addresses to states with lower tax liability. Insurance companies can shop around for states that offer them the most favorable regulation (the ones with the least customer protections), and employers can play states off each other to obtain favorable tax treatment. States simply can't design their own programs when the employers within it can simply evade the costs of the system by filing paperwork, while enjoying all the benefits of the system by dumping their employees into the state public program. A state-by-state healthcare system in the US would end up looking a lot like the consumer credit card system in the US, which is to say, we'd all have whatever rights the North Dakota and Delaware legislature had agreed to, because they were the highest bidder for the health insurance company's business.
"States' Rights" has been keeping 60's-style state capitalism alive for decades, by giving employers a huge stick with which they can extract free services from a state government, guised under the threat of "killing jobs." An employer simply threatens to move unless they can stay tax-free, dumping the costs of roads, schools, police, and health care on everyone else.
On the score of "hubris," to be fair we don't know exactly why Google Maps isn't preloaded on iOS 6. Apple's license to include Google Maps expires this year, and maybe Google wanted gobs more money, or they wanted user information, or if Google just decided to not renew it, full stop. As the Alibaba/Aliyun saga attests, Google's happy to shut down competing products that rely on their infrastructure if they aren't strategic, or as Google puts it, "compatible."
The Google Maps API ain't free, as in beer or freedom. Apple never wrote the Maps app, they asked for it and Google did them a solid by writing it and letting them use it, but they never upgraded it, and Apple had to pay them money for the privilege. Wether or not Google Maps is on your phone, be it iOS, Windows, Android, whatever, is up to Google as much as it's up to the phone vendor.
Then can you give the the 3 second description of how I can "own" three bitcoins and buy something from Alice with them, but not be able to trade them again to Bob for another transaction later?
Alice doesn't put your Oxytocin in the mail until she sees your transaction confirmed by six or seven nodes on blockchain.info -- the people calculating the blocks are validating the transactions against the rules of the system. Once the money passing to Alice is "spent" on the blockchain, all of the peers processing transactions will see your wallet as empty and any attempt to debit BTCs from a wallet that's empty will be rejected.
This can be broken if you get a peer to accept your transaction, stick it in as block and lie that it's validated; but other peers are seeing your transaction too and computing their own blocks against the truth on the chain. Six or seven different nodes have to agree on the validity of your transaction, and you have no control over which nodes will be able to validate a block containing your transaction. If you got some vast percentage of the computing power on the block chain (not a vast amount of power per se, but a commanding proportion of the total cycles computing transactions), you might be able to get enough confirmations to make your false transaction look valid. And that's a problem, and it's a way that a large single guild could possibly create rule changes, but at his time it's probably not a major issue.
The software Motorola and Samsung got 6 months before ICS was announced was decidedly not open source, they were required to enter a partner licensing and non-disclosure agreement just like a Microsoft development partner (or Apple developer) would. It might have been called "Android,"
Don't get hung up on semantics. There's a source tree, called $GOOGLE_MOBILE_OS, it's proprietary and licensed to people that agree to be bound by Google's terms. These include limitations on map data sources, obligatory packaging of Google apps, etc.
We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, so that no industry player can restrict or control the innovations of any other.
This is an interesting perspective. Google realized, to their credit, that having the source was worthless to a handset vendor unless they could have it before the competition (read: cheap Chinese OEMs ogging store shelves -- viz. Alibaba). Thus, they have a premium licensing tier that locks out modders and KIRF manufacturers, and gives member OEMs support, exclusive resources, and early closed access to the code, but for that access Google has decisive leverage over the Android ecosystem -- it can (and has) exerted control over OEM's map data sources, their ad networks, their branding, and their liberty to share the OHA Android source.
Make no mistake, unless you're running Cyanogenmod or your own homebrew AOSP, you're not running the OS that's being served off source.android.com. This is a challenge for the FOSS community -- Android's nominally open but Google moderates access to the source over time in such a way that you can't really say that Android is self-sustaining in the sense that, say, Linux would be if Linus decided to take his source tree and go Galt. The heart of the Android business model, the thing that keeps Samsung and Moto coming back year after year, is the branding, the tie-in with Google services, the leg-up Google gives them over competitors, and the horde of Google developers working on Google's time. If Google pulled out of Android it would still be open, but it'd be as dead as WebOS.
Slashdot Mirror
This was a "short" time ago, only if you live in western Europe or the urban United States. People living anywhere else on Earth, today, are placed under constant duress to either actively support the local prevailing religion, or, at best, maintain an obedient silence.
Note that moral obligation is independent of, as you say, "effectiveness." If something is immoral, you must abstain, and if something is moral, you must obey, regardless of the cost or practicality. That's why it's a moral point and not an ethical one; there are no norms involved, no question of best efforts, if it happens you've failed, end of story. If abortion is murder, then compulsory, state-enforced pregnancy must be tolerated, regardless of the "effectiveness" in regulating this. Similarly, if it is immoral for a man to die for want of money, this must be prevented, by whatever means and with whatever compulsory forces are available -- at least as much force as we apply to keep the fetal hearts beating.
On this, I wonder how many people would vote for national health insurance if we passed a law forcing everyone to work for a psychiatric services charity once a year, or to look at pictures of untreated gum disorders? These are no coercive than forced trans-vaginal ultrasounds or ritualistic, politician-dictated recitations in the doctor's office.
When someone starves, American religious conservatives don't see themselves failing their moral obligations, and they hem and haw on "the role of government" and they concern-troll on costs. But when a baby is aborted, they do see themselves as failing their moral obligations, and nothing can stand in their way to prevent it, personal liberty, the doctor-patient relationship, the integrity of the body and science be damned. Why is this?
While I doubt any pro-lifer would want a baby to die of malnutrition, we tend not to see them marching with signs in the street to that effect, and they're happy to vote for politicians that cut healthcare and education spending in favor of nominal pro-life policies (while suspiciously never actually achieving them).
Pro-lifers seem believe that the state's tolerance of abortion falls morally upon everyone in the state, and if they take no act to stop it, then they are as guilty as the doctors -- this plays into the various evangelical narrative tropes of the "sick society" or "corrupt world" that tempts judgement and requires "rescuing."
However, you don't meet many pro-lifers who believe their moral obligation to heal the sick of feed the hungry extends to getting laws passed or protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court. For some reason, whenever it comes to a social issue that codes as "left wing" from a 1950s perspective, the Pray Brigade seems to forget where they put their marching shoes.
So did Dr. Frankenstein ;)
Be fair. I never practiced any pop-psychology on Kurzweil and neither does the documentary. K speaks openly about his desire to live forever and use the information in the Singularity to bring his father back to life. You don't need to be a psychologist to put 2 and 2 together, and it's not "pop psychology" to talk about someone's motivations.
The Student worked at his computer day and night. He was so frustrated because there was so much to know. The Master asked "Why do you sit all day, in a dark room with only words?" The student said "I'm trying to transcend biological limitations!"
At once he was enlightened.
It's a weird joke because IQ is specifically supposed to exclude book learning and test innate problem solving, abstract from any knowledge context.
I would say anyone who attempts to redefine "life" in terms suited to his personal needs is a sort of stalinist, yes. Kurzweil's ideas are unmistakably millennial and rife with historical imperative, just as Marx's ideas were. People like Marx and Ayn Rand are famous for "taking an idea as far as it can go." They're the ones who serve as examples of just how cheap and useless a mere "idea" is.
I'm not sure if the fact that Lanier's essay is 12 years old is supposed to mean anything. That it's 12 years old and still relevant is a remarkable thing in this day and age.
For interesting critiques on Kurzweil, you might...
... read Jaron Lanier, particularly his One Half of a Manifesto, where he makes a pretty compelling case that Kurzweil is a "cybernetic totalist" who's pretty much willing to throw away everything that makes human life worth living in order to prove that human nature is mechanistic and reducible to mere information.
... watch The Transcendent Man, a documentary on RK, which makes the pretty compelling case the Kurzweil is in fact obsessed with "the technological singularity" not because he has a rational basis for it to be, but because he's wracked with guilt for never having a good relationship with his father, and he's obsessed with the idea that the Singularity could not just prolong him forever, but resurrect his dead father as well. He's driven by the idea that death is abandonment or alienation and he's terrified of being abandoned, again.
This scenario is a little dubious, considering how difficult it was for The Terminator to kill a paltry three Sarah Connors, let alone attempt to perpetrate a genocide.
If Costco was a government entity this argument would make sense.
As it is Costco is a retailer; retailers are at liberty in an open economy to impose whatever conditions on a sale they please, buyers accept these conditions, and free exchange happens.
Costco's interest is in keeping as many customers as possible coming to their store, by maintaining an inventory at all times. If their entire inventory is bought up by CloudBackupInc on the first day, Costco is definitely hurt by that, because their business model only works by having as many customers as possible as happy as possible.
Karl Marx couldn't have said it better himself.
The magic of Adverse Selection, when you discover the Golden Rule has a discount rate...
Value-added services naturally close down, media channels naturally open up.
The UN is not a legislative body and has no "legal jurisdiction." You've invented a new Troll Federalist argument, though: Reductio ad UNum.
In the US, you are protected from government searches, but there is no right to "privacy" from any and all, except for those things carved out of substantive due process, which are neither "in" the Constitution or positive Constitutional law.
The SHA1 of that is 3daf4cf98356e6438aaa38ccf38a77027a69db05 for you kids at home updating your rainbow tables.
Of course, this is a vicious cycle, because the local employers are all stuck with the taxes that the multinational employers talk their way out of. "Loyalty" or "culture" of course are irrelevant, because they mean nothing to shareholders (nor am I sure they should).
But if the law allows people to dump all of their costs in state A, and keep all their profits in state B, it's impossible to tell what policies "work."
If they left the state that'd be fine with everyone, the problem is corporations staying in the state, using the public services, the roads, the police and fire department, the courts, and sending their employees to the Medi-Cal office, all the while claiming that they don't have to pay for any of it because they happen to rent a mailbox in Reno, Nevada.
It's even worse in some states, where the threat of a multi-national employer moving out-of-state has convinced legislatures that they have to extend open-ended tax holidays, or grant the employer the right to pocket their employee's payroll taxes, among other things.
NASA is supposed to be SpaceX's primary customer. NASA builds a lot of satellites and space probes, manages and is the primary funder of a lot of space missions, and ships a lot of payload to the ISS.
Rockets are the means to space exploration, not the end. NASA is still a big player in the ends business, even if it doesn't develop a lot of new means lately.
You see one of these stories every few months. Behold, these people are homeless and seek out non-emergent care for their children. Wouldn't you rather these people be paying for this through insurance premiums, rather than having to rely on charity? No other country in the developed world has this.
Well yeah, they'll have insurance. These people aren't hopeless morons, and they love their children and what whats best for them. Indigent homeless are trickier, but you see a lot of working homeless families lining up around the block to get their non-emergent medical needs addressed. Under a
You forgot to call the President "hopey changey," or make a reference to the "democrat party." Minus two points.
Tort reform is a bit of a red herring. Orrin Hatch's Tort Reform proposals in '09 would have saved about $54 billion, which isn't chump change, but it would only reduce total national health spending by 0.5%. So we could claim that money on the table, but the limitations in Hatch's proposal specifically were extremely low, to the extent that they reduced pain and suffering awards to a slap on the wrist and would probably cause incidents of malpractice to increase.
State-by-state solutions are doomed in the US because of regulatory arbitrage. Employers and tax units in states with expensive programs can simply move their paper addresses to states with lower tax liability. Insurance companies can shop around for states that offer them the most favorable regulation (the ones with the least customer protections), and employers can play states off each other to obtain favorable tax treatment. States simply can't design their own programs when the employers within it can simply evade the costs of the system by filing paperwork, while enjoying all the benefits of the system by dumping their employees into the state public program. A state-by-state healthcare system in the US would end up looking a lot like the consumer credit card system in the US, which is to say, we'd all have whatever rights the North Dakota and Delaware legislature had agreed to, because they were the highest bidder for the health insurance company's business.
"States' Rights" has been keeping 60's-style state capitalism alive for decades, by giving employers a huge stick with which they can extract free services from a state government, guised under the threat of "killing jobs." An employer simply threatens to move unless they can stay tax-free, dumping the costs of roads, schools, police, and health care on everyone else.
On the score of "hubris," to be fair we don't know exactly why Google Maps isn't preloaded on iOS 6. Apple's license to include Google Maps expires this year, and maybe Google wanted gobs more money, or they wanted user information, or if Google just decided to not renew it, full stop. As the Alibaba/Aliyun saga attests, Google's happy to shut down competing products that rely on their infrastructure if they aren't strategic, or as Google puts it, "compatible."
The Google Maps API ain't free, as in beer or freedom. Apple never wrote the Maps app, they asked for it and Google did them a solid by writing it and letting them use it, but they never upgraded it, and Apple had to pay them money for the privilege. Wether or not Google Maps is on your phone, be it iOS, Windows, Android, whatever, is up to Google as much as it's up to the phone vendor.
o_O
Alice doesn't put your Oxytocin in the mail until she sees your transaction confirmed by six or seven nodes on blockchain.info -- the people calculating the blocks are validating the transactions against the rules of the system. Once the money passing to Alice is "spent" on the blockchain, all of the peers processing transactions will see your wallet as empty and any attempt to debit BTCs from a wallet that's empty will be rejected.
This can be broken if you get a peer to accept your transaction, stick it in as block and lie that it's validated; but other peers are seeing your transaction too and computing their own blocks against the truth on the chain. Six or seven different nodes have to agree on the validity of your transaction, and you have no control over which nodes will be able to validate a block containing your transaction. If you got some vast percentage of the computing power on the block chain (not a vast amount of power per se, but a commanding proportion of the total cycles computing transactions), you might be able to get enough confirmations to make your false transaction look valid. And that's a problem, and it's a way that a large single guild could possibly create rule changes, but at his time it's probably not a major issue.
The software Motorola and Samsung got 6 months before ICS was announced was decidedly not open source, they were required to enter a partner licensing and non-disclosure agreement just like a Microsoft development partner (or Apple developer) would. It might have been called "Android,"
Don't get hung up on semantics. There's a source tree, called $GOOGLE_MOBILE_OS, it's proprietary and licensed to people that agree to be bound by Google's terms. These include limitations on map data sources, obligatory packaging of Google apps, etc.
This is an interesting perspective. Google realized, to their credit, that having the source was worthless to a handset vendor unless they could have it before the competition (read: cheap Chinese OEMs ogging store shelves -- viz. Alibaba). Thus, they have a premium licensing tier that locks out modders and KIRF manufacturers, and gives member OEMs support, exclusive resources, and early closed access to the code, but for that access Google has decisive leverage over the Android ecosystem -- it can (and has) exerted control over OEM's map data sources, their ad networks, their branding, and their liberty to share the OHA Android source.
Make no mistake, unless you're running Cyanogenmod or your own homebrew AOSP, you're not running the OS that's being served off source.android.com. This is a challenge for the FOSS community -- Android's nominally open but Google moderates access to the source over time in such a way that you can't really say that Android is self-sustaining in the sense that, say, Linux would be if Linus decided to take his source tree and go Galt. The heart of the Android business model, the thing that keeps Samsung and Moto coming back year after year, is the branding, the tie-in with Google services, the leg-up Google gives them over competitors, and the horde of Google developers working on Google's time. If Google pulled out of Android it would still be open, but it'd be as dead as WebOS.